Peggy Guggenheim Collection's second round of online art classes kicks off

The second cycle of L’Arte è Vita (Art is Life), the online art history course via Zoom conceived and curated by Alessandra Montalbetti (Pinacoteca di Brera), to whom we also dedicated an interview, will kick off on January 25, 2021.

Four lectures that will span different centuries and different themes, highlighting deep links between art and worlds not always so easily traced to the latter: literature, philosophy, fashion, cinema.

It will start on January 25 at 7 p.m. with Art and Literature: “Those who do not read will have lived only one life at 70: their own! He who reads will have lived 5,000 years: he was there when Cain killed Abel, when Renzo married Lucia, when Leopardi admired the infinite ... because reading is a backward immortality.” So wrote Umberto Eco, and we can verify this in the texts in which the writer takes on a painterly quality in his narrative descriptions, or in those in which the relationship of esteem and friendship between artists is highlighted, even if they are centuries apart, as a source of inspiration, without forgetting those who fictionalized the lives of artists, with great poetic licenses.

On Feb. 1, 2021 at 7 p.m., the meeting Art and Philosophy will be held: Important philosophers have been the subject of ideal or real portraits, and many, though distant in time, have influenced artists with their theories, guiding them to unexplored destinations, freeing them from the burden of matter; still others, fraternal friends, have forced them out of their habits, stimulating them to take different paths and surprise themselves, but all these ties have a strong motivation, because the question that the artist asks is similar to that of the philosopher, but the former’s path is complicated in wanting to then share it with all of us.

On Feb. 8, 2021 at 7 p.m. it will be the turn of Art and Fashion: Some artists have stepped out of their comfort zone and designed innovative collections for fashion, which are still at least evoked today; others have been inspired by their precious collections of paintings and have taken their garments to the most important museums in the world; and still others have had the courage to surprise everyone in one of the most Pop manifestations of Italian national popular culture. It is undeniable that fashion is all around us in creating a sophisticated landscape of design vivacity and a crackling and rigorous creative kaleidoscope, as recalled by the mythical Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada.

Finally, the second cycle will conclude on Feb. 22, 2021, at 7 p.m., with Art and Cinema: The celebrated Tenth Muse, made possible by the new film and projection equipment of brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, consciously drew inspiration from the other arts that had preceded it. Artists who consciously choose cinema to tell the story of contemporary reality, filmmakers who cite the great pictorial masterpieces of the past, such as Akira Kurosawa or Stanley Kubrick, are just a few examples of the close connection between the different artistic modes, without then forgetting the route of the purely biographical narrative, so as not to deny that role of “acculturation of the masses” that many years ago, for cinema, the sociologist Walter Benjamin had already identified.

The live online lectures will be held in Italian and will last one hour (participants will be sent a link to the Zoom platform. Proceeds from the course, in the form of a 50-euro tax-deductible donation per cycle, will go to support the museum. The classes are reserved for members of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection: until December 31, 2020, you can renew your Membership Card or join at a 30 percent discount.

Finestre Sull’Arte is a media partner of the project. For information call 041.2405429, email membership@guggenheim-venice.it or visit guggenheim-venice.it.

Image: Vasily Kandinsky, Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2 (1913; Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection)

Peggy Guggenheim Collection's second round of online art classes kicks off

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